The state of 64-bit Desktop Linux

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Wed Feb 11 21:34:34 UTC 2009


| From: Marc Lanctot <lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>
| 
| Giles Orr wrote:
| > Hi Marc.
| > 
| > 2009/2/11 Marc Lanctot <lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>:
| > > My main machine at home has really been slow and I realized I made a bad
| > > purchase 2 years ago. I'm quite sure it was low quality hardware that was
| > > to
| > > blame, a HP Pavilion that came with a Pentium D chip which I'd never heard
| > > of. I never figured out if Ubuntu was the cause of any of the slow down
| > > but
| > > I do know that when I used Fluxbox over Gnome, or KDE applications vs.
| > > Gnome
| > > applications the slowdown was more tolerable. If I left my machine on all
| > > the time.. after 2-3 days it became unusable unless I rebooted it. It
| > > became
| > > quite loud too, regardless of how many fans I'd used to try to fix the
| > > heat
| > > problem.
| > 
| > The Pentium D may run hot, but it's not generally accused of being
| > "slow" (yes, the Core series is better, but the D is still a lot newer
| > than a P2).  There's probably some other problem, my first thought
| > would be to run memtest86 ...
| 
| I've done that. I've also cleaned the heat sink several times, as Lennart
| suggested.. in fact at one point it was a monthly thing :)

There is something odd about the slowdown you report.

Do you know why you feel that it is slowing down?

- Is the bottleneck CPU cycles, disk activity, network bandwidth, or
  something else?  We have been inferring that you think CPU cycle are
  the issue.

- if it is CPU cycles, where are they going?  The P4D is pretty fast.
  In fact, CPUs are not getting much faster in recent years.  Just
  more cores.  I don't find good machines from four years ago to be
  slow.

  + is there heat-throttling going on?  The P4D is quite capable of
    slowing down when it gets hot.

  + is some useless process eating CPU resources?  top(1) might help you
    discover this.  You can run a graphical system monitor program to
    show you another dimension of this.  FWIW, I've had Firefox
    quietly go into 100% CPU-eating mode.  X too.  Flash! might be
    another villain (I don't have it).

  + is some kernel activity eating CPU.  Most tools don't help you
    figure that out.  I've seen that happen too.

  + are you on Jolt and expecting the CPU to get faster as you do? :-)

I recently had an interesting experience.  My hard drive was dying.
It would cause system slowdowns (I think) because of retrying.  No
symptoms but speed.  SMART scanning found some problems.  Touch wood,
the system seems much better with a new drive.

| I think it may be because I put a higher-end NVidia card that required a 50W
| power supply which my casing was not designed for. I did my research on the
| fans and got the best ones people recommended.. but still it was hot and still
| it ended up being noisy. It could have just been that the power supply + video
| card generated too much heat.

That might be the case (pun intended).

50W?  Do you mean 50W extra?  500W?

I put a high-end nVidia card in my HP desktop a few years ago.  I
could not find reliable information about what power was required.
They would suggest an over-all system power supply rating.  Stupid
since the suggestion took no account of other things in the system.
They should specify the maximum power draw for the decice itself.

I was able to find out the HP power budget for add-in cards (good on
HP).

Just to be safe, I installed a larger power supply (but no new fans).

I like HP desktops so far.  Lennart has higher/different standards.
My HPs have been quite quiet.  But then I've never bought a P4
(Athlons seemed always like a better choice).

P4s do 64-bit really badly.  I think many 64-bit operations have to go
through the ALU twice.  It was a tack on.  Athlon 64 and Core 2 are
quite good at 64-bit operation.

64-bit isn't as much of a win as one would expect.  Code density goes
down so there is higher cache pressure.  I've run x86-64 on my desktop
for three or four years but I don't think that I'd notice the
performance difference (it takes a fairly large difference to be
noticeable without some yardstick).
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